One thought on “About”

Your intern comic is absolutely fantastic. It is so applicable, well written, easy to read and so much more engaging than the typical dry powerpoints and statistics that get thrown at us constantly.

I am a fourth year medical student from Monash in Melbourne with a keen interest in doctor and medical student wellbeing. I am involved in wellbeing at a student level (I’m running a workshop where I would like to print off and give your comic to students) and also at a hospital level at Monash Health (I could see this being distributed to 100+ interns working in our network). I would love to be able to use and distribute your comic with your permission and perhaps collaborate with you on this. Please get in touch if you can on my email above.

Evan Wexler receives the main by-line for this story, but there is no accompanying text – the entire story is contained in Taylor’s illustrations – so it’s hard to know who contributed what to this piece.

Wexler calls himself a “Visual Journalist”, and most of his other work for Frontline has an infographic aesthetic, involving images which look a lot like sans-serif fonts and attempt to convey the same myth of neutrality that’s attached to typeset text.

This piece with Taylor is interesting in that it has a more tactile and subjective feel to it. The smudged ballpoint pen ink and yellowed photographs pasted onto graph paper come close to mimicking a student assignment from the years before Microsoft Office.

There’s an emotional component to the way this data is presented, a nostalgia for the “simpler days,” when sharing a newspaper photo meant actually cutting it out of the newspaper. It’s a good illusion; I found myself staring at my computer screen looking for traces of eraser dust on the images of the paper.

And yet – a closer look at these images reveals a digitally manicured sheen. The smooth gradient colours behind the drawings, the copy-and-pasted heads in the “7/10 teens” graphic, all reveal that these images have been constructed with Photoshop, not gluestick.

It wouldn’t have been difficult to digitally massage these images to look more authentically handmade, but I don’t think that’s the point. The digital effects, subtle as they are, mark this piece as having been processed, at some stage or another, but a computer, of being buffed down and shined up by a professional designer using an expensive suite of software.

There’s just enough obvious fakery here to let the reader know that, no, of course Frontline didn’t just publish scans of some graphs drawn straight onto graph paper with a BIC pen. That’s just not how journalism works.